Jj is for Jottings 130.  Auditory Skills.

Auditory skills underpin the development of speech, language and literacy.  Therefore it is vitally important to be aware of these skills and, wherever possible, assist our children to develop them.

WHAT ARE AUDITORY SKILLS?

Auditory skills include the following:

• The ability to attend to various sounds.
• Remembering sounds.
• Being aware of the direction from which a sound originates.
• To be able to repeat a sound (if it is a speech sound).
• Awareness of sounds in the environment. (For an exercise on this, see here. That article also lists them.)
• To be aware of rhythmic patterns.
• Isolating a sound from a variety of different sounds. (Very useful if you are interested in birds!)
• To distinguish target sounds from background noise. This is very important in the classroom and in restaurants, for example.
• Drawing meaning from spoken language.
• Fusing the sounds coming into two ears into one unified impression.

In both the school situation and in everyday life, the child needs to respond to auditory stimuli, organise them and understand their meaning.

HOW AUDITORY PROBLEMS AFFECT LEARNING TO READ.

Even though a child’s hearing may be normal on a hearing test, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t have auditory problems.   The information received by the ear is transmitted to the brain, but it might not be structured, recognised, coded or stored in the normal way.  A child with auditory problems may have the following difficulties with reading:

• Discriminating between the first and last sounds in words.
• Hearing the double sounds of consonant clusters.
• Auditory discrimination of vowel sounds, especially short vowels.
• Rhyming, Part 1. And Part 2.
• Breaking words into individual sounds or syllables (analysing sounds).
• Retaining each of the syllables or sounds.
• Blending sounds together to form a word, even though the child knows individual sounds.
• Remembering sound-letter links.
• May substitute words when reading aloud.
• Distorting pronunciation of multi-syllable words, because there is a difficulty in sequencing sounds.

GENERAL EFFECTS OF POOR AUDITORY SKILLS.

When auditory skills are poor, the child may be able to attend and respond to only short units of language.  As a result, we need to shorten, simplify and repeat instructions and directions because he can’t process quickly enough to keep up with the rest of the class.

Auditory discrimination may be poor, and the child may hear speech sounds inaccurately as a result.  This can lead to word confusion, especially if the sounds are similar eg. ladder for letter.

Trying to concentrate in a room with background noise and people moving around is frequently impossible for a child with poor auditory skills.  They just can’t stop themselves from paying attention to all those competing sounds and visual distractions.

The child with severe deficits in auditory skills has difficulty in sorting out/associating sounds with particular objects or experiences.  He may “solve” the problem by ignoring sounds as if he hadn’t heard.  Or the other extreme, which is to react to every sound as if it were a new experience to investigate.  In this case we would see short attention span and hyperactive behaviour.

CAN ANYTHING BE DONE ABOUT POOR AUDITORY SKILLS?

We can train children in auditory processing skills, designing specific activities for each skill which needs remediating. Of course, training auditory skills is also part of the school curriculum, but students with deficits need extra input to strengthen weak areas.  Training children’s auditory skills helps them to learn to listen carefully to directions, auditory cues and details of sounds.  It may also increase auditory attention span.

Over time, in subsequent posts we will deal with separate auditory skills, what they are, and suggestions for remedial activities.

Although the cats are looking out of the window, it was their auditory skills which led them to that window in the first place. It’s not a window they would just happen to be passing!

 

Check out the Facebook page: Aa is for Alpacas.